poison and wine
by paper piper
Summary: Three men in Vietnam's life. Three men who created her, seduced her, broke her into herself. –Vietnam/China/France/America, a little juicier than usual


A/N: I think about Vietnam a lot. I don't know what you'll make of my thoughts.

A/N: Lyircs from the Civil Wars' "Poison and Wine." I do not own them. Nor do I own Hetalia.

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**Title**: Poison and Wine

**Summary**: Three men in Vietnam's life. Three men who created her, seduced her, broke her into herself. –Vietnam/China/France/America

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_China_

/I wish you'd hold me when I turn my back

The less I give the more I get back

Oh your hands can heal, your hands can bruise

I don't have a choice but I'd still choose you/

He was in her memories amongst the fog. A gentle hand here, on her head, telling her how beautiful she was though she was still small and naïve.

_You are precious_, he told her, and he named her his little sister-wife. When she was still waddling about on unformed knees, he was standing tall and handsome in the sunlight, placing a hat on her head to shield her eyes.

He smelled distinctly in her childhood memories of war, rice patties, and fresh earth. Her brother-husband China, a conqueror and scholar, with Chinese ink in his veins and blood on his hands. She worshipped him, the way he looked at the world and claimed it without fear: _Yes, I am the Middle Kingdom_. She traipsed after him for days, listening to his stories of warriors like Fa Mulan and watching his delicate stroke marks create pictures and—magically—words, stories, lives! He was like magic; he glowed so red, so bright.

_Wang?_ She asked one day, sitting with her tawny, dangly knees at his side._ When can I be a Lady to match you?_ She dreamed of his refinement and his realness—living in the sliver between courtly life and the rawness of the farmer. She was still all tribes and small lords, still trying to dig out her grandness and throw it on the world's altar.

Yao looked at her, sitting in a silk _qipao_, hair pinned away from her small baby-face: he was already so old to her. He took her small little-girl hands and kissed them like she was an Empress. _You will be, someday_, he promised, though he had no idea.

China raised her and claimed her thoroughly as his own. He was pale and soft and long and lean, like a slender rice noodle, so beautiful, swift, and strong against her body. She pulled his hair out of his ponytail, feeling the coarse black strands fall through her fingers: she reveled in the texture of him. She could feel all the poetry carved in his body, carved like great war scars, and there would only be more, she felt intuitively. She felt so protective of this man and his people, and she knew they would be irreparably tied together through their lives.

_I'm yours_, she cried in his language to him, though he had not asked her to declare herself.

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_France_

/Oh your mouth is poison, your mouth is wine

You think your dreams are the same as mine/

He arrived on her shores like a sun—all golden hair and blue eyes, pale, pale skin such the like only China had mentioned once before: They're white demons, he said, ghosts from another world. We can't trust them. She clung to those thoughts as the stranger took her hand and kissed it elegantly.

_My Lady_, he said in French, which she could barely understand, _I am your servant at all times._

This man, _F-ran-siss_, he called himself, spoke so quickly and with such lyrical tones that she couldn't keep up. He used strange tools to eat his strange foods, and his hair was just so very blonde. She felt blinded by his brightness, this great white light from the West. He brought lace and a very strange dark tea, and women with gowns that blew up at the bottom to make them look like lanterns. He brought all these things and made her try them—_You'll look magnifique, my dear, trust me!_

(She glanced at Yao over her shoulder: he said nothing, but quietly sipped this strange dark tea.)

She put on these _cor-sets_ made of stiff fabric and let the dressing-women pull and pluck at her hairs; she walked with Francis along her beaches, viewing the new French villas he was setting up.

_You intend to stay?_ She asked quietly, eyeing his smile.

He looked at her with lowered eyelids. He had his long hair tied back to the nape of his neck, showing off the strong curve and scruff on his jaw. She was a little startled; she realized he was shorter than Yao but had larger, rounder muscles. Yao was long and lean and tender, but this stranger was strong like a mountain.

_Do you want me to stay?_ He asked then. It was the first thing he had yet asked of her; he was always telling, telling her about his ways and his life and his beautiful home, Par-iss. What is that place? She wondered if they had mountains and rivers and monsoons there; did the women look like him? Were they beautiful like him?

She answered tentatively, _I don't know. _

He smiled then, kissed her cheek_: I'll stay then, until you decide either way._

He was a teasing lover in every way that Yao had been generous. Yao had given and given and fed off of her ecstasy, but Francis thrived on her frustration. He burrowed inside her, made himself comfortable, and then stopped. She nearly wept for desire; she desired him above all else.

Mon ami, he called her, leaving kisses all along her spine. She couldn't speak, only feel.

However, soon, she began to chafe under Francis' rule; she missed Yao and she missed her native clothing. She missed her Vietnamese folk songs, the feel of the sun on her skin without layers of French makeup. She missed seeing her men and women and children walking their own streets, unattended by French aristocrats or Chinese ambassadors.

Francis kept pulling her toward the bedroom. _Mon Ami_, he called her, and she could still feel her blood rush. He liked to distract her from herself, but that could only work for so long.

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_America_

/ You only know what I want you to

I know everything you don't want me to

Oh I don't love you but I always will

Oh I don't love you but I always will/

The man was a voice before anything else. Alfred was hollering in excitement from his helicopter, _Hey, guys, look! It's Vietnam! I can't believe how beautiful she is, she even rivals California's wine country!_

He was still a dot in the sky, then, accompanied by noise and sunlight: he was a creature from the skies.

Yao did not trust him either, and he had less respect for him than he had for Francis. _This ghost is treacherous_, he told her between gritted teeth. _He refuses diplomacy with me, yet he wants to have his way with you?_

But, oh! He spoke such beautiful things, things like individual liberty, democracy, things like private property and the Bill of Rights—how could a ghost know about these things? She listened as he went on and on about his leaders, his Founding Fathers, watched the way his eyes and face lit up talking about justice and about his Christian God. He was real, so very real and up front, in a way that Yao was not and Francis could never afford to be. He did not apologize, he did not fully understand, but he did want the best for her.

He was big and powerful, like a palace itself—so grand, so many flourishes and promises, so many words, words that plunged into her very soul. He talked even during sex; he gasped and sighed and shuddered and told her over and over again how beautiful and fine and exotic she was, like a creature from another world.

_Funny_, she thought, _you're really the one from the other world here_. Still, she loved to hear it just the same, and she let him talk her into his bed again and again.

Then—then—

The fire.

Smoke.

Screams.

Her people setting themselves aflame and losing their minds; her people turning against this newest visitor; her people finally ready to show up and confront the problem themselves—_we're not taking any more imperialists! Vietnam for the Vietnamese! _They cried. Ho Chi Minh sang her praises till his throat bled: she cracked open with desperation. She felt the impatience for freedom in her body like a great wave taking her to the bottom of the ocean.

War had begun, the war perhaps that had been inevitable due to the way the world was breaking apart. She watched Mao learning the ropes in Yao's homeland, the way Francis' government crumbled yet again in Paris, and the way Alfred's students tore open books and locked out professors. Protest. Protest. Protest, like a wildfire. Everyone was at war with something.

And here Alfred was, at war with her, even as he lay in her bed.

She pulled away, _What's happening to us?_

His eyes were sad. _I really don't know._

But she was seeing dead babies in streets, American soldiers cornering Vietnamese peasants, napalm. She was seeing Catholic orphanages bombed, white soldiers being tortured by Viet Cong, Vietnamese women weeping, weeping, weeping. Who was fighting who? She couldn't see anything, she couldn't feel anything precise: only the white pain.

She screamed at him. She'd never screamed at anyone in her entire life. He had broken her mold, and her soul issued forth with squeaks and hisses and tears.

_Do you know what you have done! You've killed us!_ (She couldn't say, _me—_)

And for once, Alfred didn't have anything to say about being a hero. He knew he was something much less than that at that second.

He only wrapped his arms around her, though she smacked and bit and clawed at him, he held her firm.

And he wept. He wept like a child in her arms, in horror of what was happening to the world and to them. Yao and Francis never cried, and they never allowed her to cry. She threw her head back to the sky and wailed like the broken child she felt they were.

She was standing on that same doorstep the day the war ended: Alfred was again in his helicopter, but this time, he was silent, staring down at her as they took him away. Her land was in ashes, it smelled like death and gunpowder. Her neighbors, Cambodia and Laos, were lying with wounds open and betrayal in their eyes.

This wasn't what he had wanted either. She heard it in his silence.

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_Vietnam_

She woke up one morning and didn't feel their caresses on her body, and she didn't miss them. She didn't know whether it was because she had never loved them, or if she had finally grown up. All she knew was, she pulled on her traditional garment and pants and walked her beaches bordering the South China Sea, and she couldn't smell fear or war anymore. She could only smell noodles cooking in the neighboring village.

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_fin._

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A/N: **Review** it, ladies.


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